Concise Control Flow with if let - The Rust Programming Language
rust-book.cs.brown.edu

I can’t help but suspect it doesn’t offer much and you may as well just use match statements for whenever you want pattern matching, however many times it might be slightly more verbose than what you could do with if let.

I feel like I’d easily miss that pattern matching was happening with if let but will always know with match what’s happening and have an impression of what’s happening just from the structure of the code.

  • OgeonEnglish
    51·
    8 months ago

    I would say it’s very useful when you are looking for one specific pattern, which happens a lot with Option<T>. Plus, being able to chain it in if / else if / else chains helps with organizing the code. It generally doesn’t grow as deep as with match.

    That said, match is fantastic and it’s totally fine to prefer using it. if let and let else are there for those cases when you tend to discard or not need to use the other values than the matched one. How often that happens depends on what you are doing.